She waited until she had a kitchen full of people before she started loud-talking her granddaughter. She talked derisively about the girl’s hair, her clothing, and how her former daughter-in-law raised the girl. Incidentally, loud-talking, in the context of African American life, is when a person makes usually slanderous remarks to others about someone when the person under discussion is immediately present and can hear it all. It’s generally a not-so indirect and not-so passive-aggressive way of communicating dissatisfaction with another’s appearance or behavior. In 2023, people sometimes described this kind of behavior as “throwing shade” or “trolling.” In the New Testament book of John, chapter nine, Jesus’ disciples loud-talked a blind man who sat begging on the side of the road they traveled on, when they wondered whose sin caused the man’s blindness.
The despicable harpy prattled on to her acquaintances, “Do you see her hair? She dyed it green! She looks like a piece of African broccoli! I told her mama I would pay for her to get the girl’s hair straightened because green looks better on straight hair anyway, but her mama encourages all that shit, always telling her to be honest and natural and real and all that kind of bullshit. Really, I don’t know what I’m supposed to do. See, that’s the difference between us and these young people.”
Your conclusion is accurate if you labeled this woman as a conversational narcissist. Everything she said to the small group gathered in her kitchen got twisted around in such a way as to paint herself as a victim, as a martyr, as the persecuted target of an imagined conspiracy being carried out by vile denizens reaching through the bloody miasma that divides life on earth from the torment of an imagined hell. In her mind, everything in the world attempted to destroy her, and she reasoned that everything she ever accomplished resulted from a superhuman effort on her part. This is, of course, ridiculous and buys into the myth of a self-made person, which disregards family support, teachers, mentors, and the networks that facilitate the development and evolution of people as they progress through their lives.
She got so caught up with her bogus narrative that facts and truth became meaningless to her, and like so many self-absorbed people, forgot about the rest of the people in the room. One of her guests, a 30-year-old painter who also worked as a substitute teacher, found her host’s rambling commentary extremely offensive, especially since she considered herself to be one of the “young people” the hostess referred to. She sat her glass of Chablis on the kitchen counter and told her mother that she planned to leave immediately. Already annoyed with her mother for inviting her to the woman’s house, she found the girl with the green Afro hairstyle and said, “Hey kid, you wanna get out of here?”
The teenager jumped with such enthusiasm that she leaped over the coffee table sitting in front of the couch she sat on.
“You mean leave? Hell yeah, man! My grandma’s being a class six hundred sixty-six bitch right now.” She grabbed her backpack. “Come this way can leave without anyone seeing us.”
On the sidewalk in front of her grandmother’s house, the green-haired teen told the artist, “So where do you want to go? My other grandma and my grandpa live over in Modesto. I’d go visit them, but I’m supposed to be back at the harpy’s house by nine this evening or else I’ll get in trouble, and you probably guessed that it won’t be fun.”
The artist laughed. “The harpy, you say? That’s funny. I get it,” the painter said, “You can’t get a break, can you? Hey, you wanna see my studio? Believe it or not, I live at my mom’s house. I live in the mother-in-law unit in her backyard and that’s where I have my studio too. Come on. My car is over there across the street.”
They had a nice time visiting the artist’s home and studio. The artist sometimes worked as a substitute teacher in Modesto and nearby Ceres until she had enough to pay rent to her mother and cover her other expenses. She earned the Bachelor of Fine Arts (BFA) degree from Cal State Stanislaus, and studied privately with renowned painter Edward Percival “Percy” Burgess.
On the way back to the harpy’s house, the conversation turned to music.
“Lately, I’ve been listening to rap from the early days, the 1980s and 1990s because they seemed focused on telling a story, you know,” the artist told the girl, but “I also listen to this guy who calls himself Gibberish Maximus sometimes.”
“Gibberish Maximus? Really? Have you heard ‘Scannaramma?’ That piece is crazy!”
“Oh, yeah, that’s the one where he calls himself Fubont, right? I also like the Chicken Butt one, the Naughty Boy.”